You have thin soles so you can tell where you are in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.

Ps Drink room temp water and you won’t even want any cold drinks ever again.

It keeps it moderately acceptable to drink, really.

Wow, folded real quick there, huh?

Wait…

I live in hot Ecuador and no ac in main rooms

So you say room temperature, but really it’s warm.

Yeah, they’re the bonehead who worded things poorly…

Ah! You got me! I made a spelling error. I concede all on your points now. I guess you’re 100% right now. Man, you really got this arguing thing down.

I having a stroke or are you? I’m not sure what her having won the popular vote and lost the EC in states she didn’t campaign in has to do with her “elevating trump.”

The person you’re replying to seems correct to me in that these are excerpts from a plan drafted by her team, but it does seem to be missing evidence they put it into action. Her not campaigning in some states isn’t that, right?

And honestly, I can kind of see their point. Sure, in hindsight it’s easy to criticize the idea post trump election, but most people would not have taken a trump campaign seriously. Especially in 2014 when this was written. It’s a extremely normal and valid tactic to try and prop up what’s perceived as a candidate that can be easily beat in a national election to cut out any real competition during the primaries.

But strategy aside, there’s still nothing showing the Clinton campaign “elevated” trump. Even reading that article, the most they did was nothing. They just focused their attacks elsewhere because he wasn’t a serious target. Again, that’s what everyone does. Why waste millions in advertising dollars to attack someone who seems like they’re going to lose anyway? Surely you want to work on taking down your actual rivals early? Turns out they were wrong, but so were most of us in 2014.

I worry that the decades that republicans spent demonizing Hillary Clinton worked all too well on even more progressive voters and people will see malice in everything she ever did, and misjudgments that we were all guilty of are viewed as unforgivable when she does it. By all accounts I remember reading, she’s not terribly charismatic, but has always been a very effective leader once in position. Nobody like campaigning Hillary, but poles for her when she was in an office were great.

Not a hockey fan, is that because it’s too cheap or too expensive?

While it doesn’t work as well with or as your joke, the ATF is actually now the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives. So we need to add the E as well and we can spell FACET, which is less fun. Or use M for Marijuana and spell FMEAT.

So building on this I did some light perusing on the internet and got a little hyperfixated, but found some tiny things.

This was the closest Solingen I could find, but the caps on the end don’t match and I doubt the little rivets would be completely hidden by the patina, so that’s probably not it.

Then on Etsy I found this posting That has one that looks identical but with no further information on it and listed as “Richards” (Richards, Sheffeild). And This one that just doesn’t have the smaller blade but is listed as Solingen.

I went to try and double check that patent number and I’m not finding what they did, but I also don’t know what I’m doing. The German patent office has 2 companies with that patent number, one for Naproxen and one for the moving blades on hair trimmers.

But then I found This guy with the exact same patent number on it but marked as Hammer brand. It’s very similar but has 3 blades instead of 2.

This leads me to believe that the patent is not for the whole knife but the blade specifically that was made by Solingen and sold to other knife manufacturers who affixed them to their own pocket-knife-pieces. With all this in mind, I’m starting to think it’s likely from Richards, so I refined my search again and found this guy as the best bet: knife. But instead of the patent number on the tang they have their own stamp. So my best guess, after a tiny bit of research, is that Richards probably made it, but it’s not their top of the line stuff with their branding but something akin to a “store brand” where they used their typical parts but used the blades from Solingen. I’m still assuming it’s Richards because they were the only brand I could find that made knives with all the parts (Same end caps, 2 blades, pearl handle with no rivets showing, shape) together. Other brands seemed to have some, but not all parts combined. But with the tang stamp being off, I can only assume it wasn’t an “official” Richards brand but put together by them and sold by another party as a cheaper alternative.

If you’re still curious, that All About Pocket Knives site seems to have active forums with knowledgeable people who could probably (almost definitely) find or know more than me. I don’t know anything about any of this and was just a bit bored this morning while drinking my coffee, so I definitely suggest asking them for legit advice.

Jesus fucking christ. You know how water works, right? It fits the form of the container it’s in. It’s an simplified analogy to explain what that other guy linked to. We (well, you) see a universe fit to our kind of life, but the reality is that we developed to fit the universe.

You remind me of this guy I saw the other day claiming that a whole bunch of rocks that are vaguely shaped like body parts might be fossilized body parts.

He just kept saying “I’m not saying it definitely is, but imagine if we don’t understand the world, and it’s maybe this way? Crazy right?!”

It’s such cowardly bullshit. If you want to believe a thing because it sounds nice to you, don’t half-ass it and throw qualifiers on it. You brought it up, and then when challenged the tiniest bit, backed down with a “I’m not saying that’s definitely true… but maybe…?”

and that doesn’t match our expectations.

What expectations? Actual scientist, using facts, don’t have expectations of alien life. We don’t know the probability of life existing anywhere but here because we have nothing to compare it to. We have the one universe with the one data set available to us. Until we discover alien life, we should have no expectation for it. Do I think it’s likely there is life elsewhere? Yes. Does that mean I expect it? No. We don’t have enough information about the cosmos to even start to calculate whether it should happen.

I had a roommate once who believed that the stuff from the Alvin the Maker book series was real. The magic and shit. I asked if he had anything that led him to believe that or if he just really liked the books and wanted it to be. OF course he didn’t have any evidence or real reason for it. He just wanted it to be so, so he decided that he was going to believe that thing.

You’re doing that. Stop it. Be a grown-up here and stop believing in make-believe and believe things only when we have sufficient (or in your case, I’ll take any) evidence.

Have you heard of the puddle analogy?

A small amount of water sits there, it this hole in the ground it finds itself in. It looks at this cavity, observes how perfectly it fits the contours of their liquid body. It’s perfect! Every nook and cranny seems to be formed to fit the puddle perfectly.

“This hole must have been made for me! It’s too much of a coincidence that, with all the ways a hole could form, this one formed perfectly to fit me!”

You’re doing that. You’re saying it’s a crazy coincidence that all the right things were in place here for life to exist that led to us being here… but if it wasn’t, then we just wouldn’t have developed as life-forms. Or if the environs were different, life would have developed to fit into that kind of solar system. I think you just like the idea, so you believe it, but I think it’s better to believe things we have evidence for.

The way I remember that Affect is active. You affect things. Effect is passive, and is the result of something. Affect is a verb (and I think sometimes can be a descriptor). Effect is always a noun. So you can have the resulting effect of an experiment, but if you mess with some variables, you have affected the effect.

Though, in this case, you’re turning the noun into a verb, so you could make the case for either use I think. If you hyphenate it though you can leave it as is without thought. "Streisand-effecting.

Years ago I had a CEO of the company I worked at make a similar comment; “affect/effect. No one really knows which one to use.” So my contrarian, anti-authority ass just looked it up right then and decided to always know.

I don’t know that many people say that because of the story though. It created many of the cinematography methods we still use today. Before it, movies were generally just recreating stage plays in front of a camera. Every scene a stationary shot framing the whole room. No real transitions. For Citizen Kane they tore apart the roof and floor to allow for a camera to get moving shots zooming into a scene and angles not often used before. It changed the way people thought of movies and what they could be. People do love watching the slow decline of the powerful, but that movie is considered one of the best movies for other reasons.

Yeah, and the contracts I sign specify goat killing only when the contract is signed.

Oh! Have they fixed their supplying issues? I haven’t had a drink in a while, but for years they were having trouble keeping stock in most stores because they had a distillery fire and had to run with what they had stored. Even after that, any time I’d find a place that would get some, they’d only be able to get a single case in and it would be sold out within a day or 2. I basically had to get lucky and happen to stop by the same day they got it in, but before they stocked the shelves. It was probably solid 5-6 years of never seeing it on a shelf and only getting it if I asked for it and they go it from the back.

To use your alcoholic analogy. Imagine you were a terrible alcoholic and you decide to get better. Great! But you can’t STOP drinking. Not completely. You have to stop drinking too much while also NEEDING to have 2-3 single drinks a day to survive. So every day. Every. Single. Day. Multiple times a day you have to face that temptation. Your brain and body are craving you down a fifth of vodka when you wake up, but you’re only supposed to drink a watered down Bloody Mary instead. You have to taste that vodka and get a tiny bit of that dopamine hit from it, but you just have to stop. Your kitchen is full of liquor bottles, but you have to just wait until lunch to have your next drink with that craving eating away at you.

And then you hit the breakroom at lunch to sip on your small shot of whiskey you brought from home, but the breakroom is a cocktail bar and everyone around you is downing a couple pints of lager or a Long Island Ice Tea. There’s an open bar right there! Plenty of drinks easily available and your mind is begging you to just go get some. But you’re not abstaining completely. You just have to sit there and sip on your tiny bit of alcohol and that’ll just be enough.

For your nightly drink, you always take it at home. You can’t go to a restaurant with anyone, or even by yourself. You can’t order in. The smallest drinks they serve is a full pint. And still, while you down that Manhattan as quickly as you can every night so as not to think about it too much, you have to go to your kitchen to prepare it with the shelves full of liquor. And just have that one drink. Everyone else gets to have a few drinks a day and move on with their life, but for you every meal is a fight to not go off the deep end while dipping your toes just a little into the pool.

And then tomorrow you have to wake up and do it again.

And every day for the rest of your life.

And that’s just me trying to appeal to your empathy, assuming you have any. There’s science that shows that the dopamine (or maybe serotonin, I always get them confused) that food addicts get is just as addictive as a hard drug habit. It’s literally the same thing. That’s why drugs feel good. It’s not just the altered state that’s addictive. The chemicals your brain release when it gets these things make you crave more. Some people’s brains light up from eating some foods. It’s the same thing as a drug habit, but you can’t quit. Ever. There’s science to back up how wrong you are. You just don’t have to deal with it and you can’t imagine how anyone could have different experiences than you.

The only upside to living in shithole states like Alabama is that, because it’s a shithole, it’s cost of living is also cheaper. So even if one could afford the moving costs, being able to afford living somewhere with more progressive values can be tough for a lot of people. Especially if they grew up with an education from said shithole state. (I can say things like that. My cousin married a shithole state).